Improving Your Heart Health

4 Essential Tips for Improving Your Heart Health

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle that includes a healthy diet, low stress and regular physical activity is imperative for boosting your heart health. Couch potatoes who eat an excessive amount of fatty, processed foods should be aware that they are at much greater risk for heart disease. The good news is that it’s never too late to get started on making healthy improvements that not only promote better heart health, but that also lead to dramatically enhanced physical and emotional well-being. You can get started with the following tips for heart health.

1. Assess Your Diet

Does your diet consist of pre-made foods that are loaded with fats, sugar, additives, and other unhealthy ingredients? Write down a list of your typical daily diet and tick off the meals that include processed foods such as white bread, white rice, refined flour, refined sugar, and fast food. Then, begin to eliminate these foods from your diet.

2. Add Heart-Healthy Foods

Once you begin eliminating unhealthy foods from your meals, you will need to replace these items with healthier options. For instance, replace white rice with brown rice, cook with whole grain flour instead of white flour, use honey or maple syrup instead of white sugar, and eat home-prepared meals more and fast food less.

3. Get Off the Couch

Improving the health of your heart must include regular physical activity. If you are new to exercise, make small changes at first such as taking the stairs whenever possible instead of the elevator. Take a short walk every day and then begin to challenge yourself more as you make progress.

4. Reduce Stress

Stress plays a significant role in raising blood pressure, unhealthy hormones, and increasing your heart rate. Exercise is one great way to reduce stress levels. Take other steps to reduce stress such as spending less time plugged into the Internet, TV, MP3 players, and so on, while increasing the amount of time you spend outdoors enjoying relaxing activities that work to de-stimulate the brain.

If you have questions about healthy eating for improving your heart health contact your local doctor, who will arrange for you to see a dietitian and nutritionist.

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About Us

We are Dietitians and Nutritionists, Speech Pathologists and Skincare Specialists. We see adults and children from our office in Randwick. Passionate about health and wellbeing, we write about issues relevant to our clinical practice.